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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27141656">Subway wind</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/JungMichan/pseuds/JungMichan'>JungMichan</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Splintered Light: EXO Canon-AU Oneshots [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>EXO (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Canon Compliant, Fantasy, Gen, Light Angst, Magic, Magical Realism, Platonic Relationships, Subways, Unicorns</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 21:14:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,046</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27141656</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/JungMichan/pseuds/JungMichan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Yixing finds himself lost in the subway tunnels in a blackout - and there's something down there with him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kim Junmyeon | Suho/Zhang Yi Xing | Lay</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Splintered Light: EXO Canon-AU Oneshots [5]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2166735</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Subway wind</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Yixing is the last to leave the practice studio. The other members have gone in the van, but Yixing stayed behind to work out some choreography, a new dance break he might teach to Sehun, if it comes to anything.</p><p>He thinks about getting a taxi, but there are none in sight. After being cooped up in the studio all day the air feels refreshing, cool as it plays on his skin. It is early evening, and the lowering sun sends golden autumn light shafting between the high rise buildings, creating long shadows. He pulls the hood of his sweater over his head, hiding his face in its baggy depths. Plain black hooded sweatshirt, plain black jeans; nobody will look at him twice.</p><p>Yixing walks five blocks, then ten. Thirsty, he stops at a convenience store and buys a bottle of water. The cashier does not recognize him, does not even glance at his face. At the plastic table outside two middle-aged men are smoking; one is half-lying over the table and the other is staring into a plastic cup, a green bottle of soju beside it. A young woman in jeans and a varsity jacket leans against the glass window, staring at her phone. She is pretty.</p><p>Yixing walks on, trying to imagine how it would feel to go out with the young woman in the varsity jacket, to hold her, to kiss her the way men kiss women in movies. He finds it impossible.</p><p>This morning there had been him and Junmyeon, just the two of them, left in a dark recording studio, leaning tiredly against the wall. Junmyeon’s hand had risen to Yixing’s face, graceful fingers tracing the line of his jaw, some emotion Yixing could not identify softening his eyes. He had looked at Junmyeon, wondering, waiting for him to do something or say something in a way Yixing could understand, and finally Junmyeon had dropped his hand. He shook his head and laughed, in a way that had sounded a little like something breaking.</p><p>Yixing walks on, and his body seems to ache, as if the uses it should be put to are all wrong for him.</p><p>Thunder growls and swells above him, and he looks up to find the sky filled with surly cloud. A storm has been brewing overhead and he had not noticed. The sky crashes again and he feels it in his chest. It will rain. He can smell it.</p><p>He thinks of the T-money card in his wallet, and it brings him the memory of 17-year-old Junmyeon loading it for 16-year-old Yixing, when Yixing was freshly arrived from China. They were in a bright convenience store not quite like the one he has just left, but similar enough that it makes no difference. They’d been the same height then, but now Yixing is taller. Of all the trainees Junmyeon had been training the longest; he knew how everything worked, and he knew how to worry, and how to care; perhaps something he’d learned somewhere in the long years of his training, or perhaps something he’d known all along.</p><p>Junmyeon’s hair had turned into a fluffy brown aureole in the summer humidity, and he’d tried to control it by scraping it into a ponytail right on top of his head. It had looked ridiculous, and it had made Yixing smile through his homesickness.</p><p>“Don’t take the subway alone,” Junmyeon had told Yixing as he put the hard blue card into his palm. “Nor at night.”</p><p>He’d taken Yixing to the gaping mouth of a subway station, and they’d looked down into it. Yixing thought it was like the mouth of a snake, jaw dislocated, unhinged, stretched wide to swallow the busy people rushing in and down, to regurgitate the ones climbing up and out. A blast of hot air had come out from below, blown his hair back from his face and made his thin white t-shirt flap. It smelled like concrete, like oil, like dust and litter and something else, something Yixing had never smelled before; perhaps the very centre of the earth smelled like this. It had made Yixing stop in his tracks, rock back on his heels, and Junmyeon had stopped with him.</p><p>“It’s just the subway wind,” Junmyeon had said, and taking Yixing’s hand in his, had led him down.</p><p>A small movement attracts Yixing’s attention, in the mouth of a narrow street that scrapes between tall buildings. He pauses as the shadows resolve into an old woman, wrapped in layers upon layers of ragged garments, a wrinkled face peering at him from the top of them. One gnarled hand clutches a shopping trolley filled with plastic bin bags. Yixing should walk on. Anyone else would. The homeless are invisible, it seems, to almost everyone but Yixing.</p><p>Yixing stops, and she stares up at him, black gimlet eyes in a face collapsed into wrinkles.</p><p>“It is going to rain,” Yixing says to her.</p><p>“Yes,” the woman says.</p><p>“Do you know where the homeless shelter is?”</p><p>She does not answer this time, just keeps staring. Yixing describes the way to the shelter, just in case she doesn’t know, and starts to walk on, but there’s a sudden flurry of movement below him and a hand wraps around his wrist, cold fingers alarmingly strong.</p><p>“Beware the hunt, boy,” she says, voice cracking like hard candy bit down on between teeth. “Beware the hunt.”</p><p>Yixing nods slowly, and she lets him go, receding back into her pool of shadows. He rubs his wrist as he walks on. Her words were senseless, crazed, yet they linger with Yixing, wreathing around him like smoke and ghosts, <em>beware the hunt</em>, until he’s distracted by the heavy slap of the first raindrops on the pavement around him. He looks down, watches wet circles appear before his feet, patterning the pavement in darker gray, more and more, filling in the gaps.</p><p>Yixing looks up from the pavement and in front of him is the open mouth of a subway station. He moves towards it. There is no illumination at the entrance to the subway, but a light glows from somewhere deeper down. He goes down the steps into the station and hears the hum of the escalators. He taps his T-money card against the reader, just like Junmyeon had shown him back then, and steps onto the escalator, and it carries him down. The light increases until he can read the advertisements behind their glass. There are no other people going up or down. Yixing supposes he has chanced on a still moment between the surges of the crowd. Junmyeon’s warning about going into the subway alone rises in his mind, then fades away again.</p><p>The escalator is longer than those he has been on before. He wonders if this particular tunnel is some sort of natural fissure in the earth which has been incorporated into the subway system. Without warning, the subway wind blows, and Yixing breathes it in, the thick press of it pushing at his face, blowing his hood back off his head, dragging at his hair. It smells of concrete, of rock, of heat gone cool somewhere along its journey. It smells of the underworld, of things he’s never seen.</p><p>Finally he reaches the bottom. Sitting with his back against a supporting brick column is a man with long, straggly black hair bursting out from under a grey beanie. He has a zither in his lap and the case is open in front of him. He plucks a single, long, wailing note that bends upwards at the end, then pulls a cigarette from his pocket, then a lighter. The flame gives his features a reddish cast as he lights it and takes a deep breath, eyes half closed.</p><p>As Yixing passes, he fishes a coin from his pocket to throw into the case. The man’s eyes open at the chink and rest momentarily on Yixing. They are the same dull sheeny brown of his zither. The platform beyond the column is empty until another man in a sleeveless singlet steps out from behind a second brick column. He comes towards Yixing, brandishing a deformed arm that ends at the wrist, and Yixing wonders if he wants money too. He has a few coins left in his pocket, but the man does not hold out his remaining hand. He just stops in front of Yixing and stares at him.</p><p>“What do you want?” Yixing asks.</p><p>“Salvation,” the man says, so softly Yixing thinks he might have misheard. He withdraws back into the shadows before Yixing can ask him to repeat himself.</p><p>Yixing wonders if these people live in the subway, hiding in the maze below the world. If all the mouths to the subway shut, they would creep out of their hiding places, knowing they need fear no one except others like themselves.</p><p>He thinks of the homeless woman. He looks beyond the column and thinks he sees her, wheeling her trolley, and there’s another, younger woman shuffling beside her in a long ragged skirt and dirty bare feet, clutching a baby to her chest. The old homeless woman glances straight at Yixing and says, “Beware the hunt.”</p><p>Yixing closes his eyes and when he opens them, the beggar woman and the young woman with the baby are gone. Instead, sitting at the very edge of the platform, is a short-haired black dog, sturdy with muscle. The dog turns its head to watch Yixing approach, and gives its black tail a single flick that might be a welcome or a warning.</p><p>“What are you doing here?” Yixing asks it softly, and thinks he hears the echo of the homeless woman’s voice behind him, the same words spoken along with his own. He turns around, but the platform is empty. The man with the zither is gone.</p><p>The subway wind gusts again and it smells of the storm which must be breaking in the city above. Yixing’s hair streams out around his head, and as he turns towards the tracks a train punches from the tunnel, a single light glaring from the front like a cyclops eye, and howls past without slowing or stopping. He looks for the dog, but it has gone, and then the train is gone too, and it has taken all the light with it, leaving Yixing standing in inky blackness. He stands very still, waiting for the lights to come back on, but the dark remains, clinging to him like a black silk cloth.</p><p>Yixing finds his phone in his pocket. The bluish glow of the screen pushes against his face. He taps the torch icon and a bright white beam slices the blackness. He plays the beam carefully back and forth to find the escalator. He cannot hear its asthmatic hum, but it might have gone off when the lights went out. He must have gone further along the platform than he had realised, because he cannot find it in the darkness, cannot find anything but concrete platform and the drop to the tracks. A shiver rises up through him, and his chest feels tight. He taps his contacts icon and finds Junmyeon, but when he tries to call, it will not connect. He looks at the reception bar and finds that he has none. He is too deep within the earth.</p><p>Yixing shines his light around again and it catches a ghostly white sign on the wall. He walks towards it, hearing how his footsteps echo. He is wearing soft-soled sneakers and he walks lightly, and yet they echo. There is a word written on the sign, and he sounds out the hangul, but the sounds do not turn into a word he understands. But there is an arrow beneath the word, directing him clearly onward. Thinking there must be another part of the platform, or perhaps steps that will let him climb up and out, he walks on. After a while he realises that the platform has gone narrow, and when he shines his light on graffitied wall on one side and a sharp drop to the rails on the other, he understands that he is walking along one of the narrow ledges that run inside the subway tunnels.</p><p>He stops, throat clenching, and in the absence of his wrongly-echoing footsteps he hears something. Something like distant wild laughter, or screams, or crying. His heart starts to bang against his ribs. He listens again and there is not one just voice but many of them, coming from up ahead. The subway wind blows so hard it rocks him back on his feet.</p><p>Another train? He glances back towards the platform, but then turns forward again because now he can hear a tremendous clattering, as if a herd of cows or goats are being driven along the tunnel. But the clatter resolves into the hoof beats of a single beast, with a loud accompaniment of echoes. Something appears in his torch beam, too massive to be illumined by it. The only certainties are a massive whiteness and a black eye rolling in terror. Yixing staggers back against the wall, stumbling into a shallow alcove, and the huge thing passes him by so closely that he feels the roughness of its hide drag against his sweatshirt and the damp panting heat of its fear.</p><p>A horse, he tells himself as he hears it gallop towards the platform. Or a bull. But bigger than any bull or horse he has ever seen. Impossibly big. How can it be down here?</p><p>The voices are louder and now he can make out shouting and laughter and grunts and cries and shrieks and even what seems to be discordant snatches of song. Shaking, he fumbles to switch off the torch beam and hides the light of the screen against his front, pressing himself into the alcove. In the light of dull lanterns that barely light their faces, let alone the way ahead, he sees men and women, ragged and degenerate and stumbling, some so twisted and hunched over that they look like animals. As they stream past him on the narrow ledge he thinks he sees the woman with the baby he imagined earlier, her mouth stretched in a soundless scream. Last of all comes the zither man with a great loop of rope over one shoulder, and only then does Yixing realise that this motley crowd are a hunting party, and the white beast that had thundered by him their prey.</p><p>When they have all passed and the noise has faded, Yixing slides his thumb up the icon on his torch app and shines the white light after them. His heart leaps into his throat, for there, looming in the light’s thin stream, is the wild tormented eye of the white beast. Somehow it has evaded the hunters and doubled back. It is trembling, and Yixing senses it is about to plunge away from him into the darkness, perhaps down onto the electrified third rail.</p><p>“Don’t,” he says.</p><p>The beast shifts uneasily, but stays as Yixing moves closer. The thin beam illumines a horse-like ear pricked forward and, fleetingly, something long and shining and sharp. Yixing reaches out with a trembling hand and lays it on the coarse white coat. Powerful muscles ripple beneath his palm as the beast gathers itself to leap away, or perhaps trample him to death. Then all at once it becomes still, and the violence of its terror fades.</p><p>“Come with me,” Yixing whispers. He moves his hand to its hot neck and starts to walk, back towards the platform, and it comes with him.</p><p>Now that Yixing walks by its head, he can see that it is definitely a horse, but its head is deformed. It is no less a freak than the subway people hunting it, for all its strange beauty. Yixing wonders if he was mistaken and they were not hunting it, but trying to catch their escaped pet. Had he seen a yearning in the eyes of the zither man? But even if that is so, why should they keep this poor beast in the blackness of the subway tunnels?</p><p>When the ledge opens up, Yixing stops so he can look again for the escalator with his phone light. The beast nuzzles his neck tenderly, seeming to inhale his smell, and he shivers at the velvet of its nostrils against his sensitive skin. Then he hears the distant clamour of the hunt again, if it is a hunt. Instinctively he turns to the beast and tells it to run, but although it shivers, it will not go. Its liquid dark eyes plead with him. Yixing makes himself push it away roughly. It is like trying to push a mountain. He can smell the musky thickness of its sweat.</p><p>“I can’t protect you from them!” Yixing cries. “Run! Run away!”</p><p>But it stays. It rests its head on his shoulder and leans against him. The weight of the massive head forces Yixing’s legs to buckle slowly, and when he’s on his knees on the concrete subway platform, it kneels too, and lays its lovely deformed head in his lap.</p><p>“Oh, you poor thing, you must go,” Yixing murmurs as he shines his light down onto it, but the violet sadness of its eyes ask him only where it should go, and Yixing has no answer for that.</p><p>Then it is too late. There’s a great roar of triumph and the ragged men and women with dirt-streaked faces and crazed eyes are capering around them in the darkness, crowing with glee as they catch hold of the great white beast by its mane and tail and ears. Filthy hands drag it away and brush Yixing aside without seeming to even notice him when he tries to hold onto it. Or so it seems, until one of the men, a great hulking hunchback with an ash-brown beard, looks over his shoulder at Yixing and says with rough gentleness: “You found it.”</p><p>“What are you going to do with it?” Yixing asks, trembling. “Will you take it out of here?”</p><p>“Up there?” The man jerks his chin up contemptuously. “Up there is no place for the likes of beasts, boy.”</p><p>Yixing stands boneless, heart breaking as they surge away and are swallowed by the dark, knowing that he has stayed the beast for the crowd. Without him, they would never have caught it. Exhaustion deep as a mineshaft opens within him. A surge of the subway wind wrestles his phone from his limp fingers. It clatters down onto the platform, its beam gone down to a glowing rectangle. As Yixing crouches to pick it up, the wind blows again, gently, a mere sigh, cool and damp with the smell of stagnant water.</p><p>Yixing feels lost. He picks up his phone and looks at the screen. Still no reception. He stays crouched, clasping his phone to his chest with both hands, tasting salt water on his lips, feeling the heavy weight of the beast’s head in his lap, and seeing in the darkness the violet sadness of its eyes.</p><p>His phone makes a warning chime in his hands. He looks at it and sees his battery has almost died. He turns his phone off to save the last few percent, and is swallowed by the dark.</p><p>Time passes strangely after that, an endless stretch of being that seems to make no sense. He cannot tell if his eyes are open or closed unless he puts his fingers to them, feels the soft skin of his eyelids beneath his fingertips. He brushes them along his lashes. They are wet, and so are his cheeks. After a long while he hears clattering again, and the distant sound of voices. His head goes up, eyes stretched wide. He tries to turn on his phone, but all he gets is a momentary gleam of the logo before it dies again. He looks around, and a pair of eyes glint in the darkness, and he scrambles back, but it is only the dog again.</p><p>He reaches a trembling hand towards it, and his fingers touch warm short fur, the thick muscle of its head.</p><p>“Why are you here?” he asks it, but the only answer is the dog sitting down beside him. The warmth of it against his side reminds him again of the beast. The voices are coming closer, but they are from above this time, and not as crazed. Broad beams of light sweep somewhere up ahead, bobbing up and down with footsteps, and they glint off stairs, and the calls start to make sense.</p><p>“Is anybody down here?”</p><p>Yixing’s throat locks tight with sudden desperation. He scrambles to his feet and clutches for the dog, but it slips away into the blackness and is gone. “Here,” he tries to call, and his voice is nothing but a crack. He coughs and tries again. “Here! Over here!”</p><p>“Stay still, it’s dangerous to move in the dark. We’ll find you.” The voice is male and strong, and Yixing stands like a statue until the torches catch him and fix him in their beams, containing him in a glow of golden light.</p><p>He is led towards the silent escalators and up the stairs between them, hands gripping his arms as he stumbles, legs trying to give way beneath him. They tell him a lightning strike has caused a wide-scale blackout. Yixing looks back over his shoulder into the pooling dark.</p><p>“What is it? The beast that lives in the tunnels?” he asks. The police officers look at him. They look at each other, eyes meeting across his head.</p><p>“You’re safe now,” one of them tells him, and Yixing knows better than to ask again.</p><p>It is night outside. The streetlights are out too. The police officer drives Yixing back to the dorms, where Junmyeon opens the door, gasps, and grabs him in a tight hug. He trembles as he holds Yixing close. “I was so worried,” he says, “so worried, Yixing…”</p><p>Yixing cannot answer.</p><p>Junmyeon leads him into the living room, where the others cluster around a makeshift lamp Baekhyun has made by balancing a plastic water bottle on his phone screen. Their faces are eerie, lit by the white light diffusing through the water.</p><p>“He was lost in the subway,” Junmyeon tells them.</p><p>Yixing is wrapped in warm arms. The others play word games and tell stories, waiting for the power to come back on. Yixing sits with Junmyeon’s arm around his shoulders and Sehun clinging to his waist like a limpet, and thinks of the clatter below the surface, and the beautiful beast, and how it was captured because it trusted Yixing, and starts to cry.</p><p>“Was it not real?” He asks through his tears. “Was I dreaming? Did I make the whole thing up?”</p><p>“Make what up?” Junmyeon asks, but Yixing cannot explain. He curls up until his head lies in Junmyeon’s lap, like the beast had laid its head in his. His heart aches in a way he cannot understand. Junmyeon cards a hand through Yixing’s hair, and the others talk about things he can’t connect with, their voices going into meaningless murmurs, soothing.</p><p>When the power finally comes back on, to cries of relief and yelps as they squint their eyes shut, readjusting to the brightness, the others start to jump up and disperse into the kitchen or their bedrooms. Junmyeon moves his hand from Yixing’s head to his shoulder.</p><p>“Are you okay?”</p><p>Yixing sits up and rubs his face. In the electric light, the dorm looks so normal. It chases the last of the shadows away.</p><p>“Yes,” he says. “I’m sorry. I imagined something crazy while I was down there in the dark.”</p><p>Junmyeon smiles at him. “Anyone would be scared, lost in a subway in a blackout,” he says. “But you’re safe now.” His eyes are drawn down as Yixing nods, and his head tilts, face going confused as he reaches out towards Yixing’s black sweatshirt.</p><p>“Where did all this come from?” He brushes his fingers against Yixing’s front. Yixing looks down, and the whole world stutters.</p><p>The front of his sweatshirt and jeans are covered in coarse, white hairs.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I hope you enjoyed the story! If you feel like it please drop a kudos or leave a comment, it means the world to me! ^_^</p></blockquote></div></div>
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